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| View Larger Image | Uncommon Carriers
by John McPhee
| | List Price: | $24.00 |  | | 5 New starting at: | $11.39 | | 8 Used starting at: | $6.96 | | | | | Sales Rank: | 411961 | | Studio: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 256 | | Publication Date: | May 16, 2006 | | Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation.
Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot,
eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the “tight-assed” Illinois River on a
“towboat” pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being “a good deal longer than the Titanic.” And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John,
in a homemade skiff in 1839.
Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author’s warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.
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CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 30 reviews)
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Not a novel! 
To reviewer prisrob: Uncommon Carriers is not a novel. Like all of McPhee's books, it is a work of non-fiction journalism.
October 25, 2008 | |
Extraordinary book about ordinary jobs
I was a little reluctant at first to start this book, thinking to myself "how interesting can a book about train engineers, truck drives, and barge pilots be?" But that is precisely McPhee's talent--being able to write interesting, insightful stories about ordinary things we see, and virtually ignore, every day.
The book is a compilation of essays McPhee wrote about his experience riding in an eighteen wheeler, a train, a river barge, and his own canoe (and his experience at the UPS sorting facility). In each essay, McPhee shares very interesting insights from those who perform the jobs that our economy so heavily depends upon. He does an excellent job of sharing the knowledge he learned from each experience while intertwining interesting stories from the people he encounters. The net result is an excellent book that will be both educational and very entertaining.
Upon finishing this book, I realized how insulated we are from the mechanisms that deliver us the things we depend on to live. We use tons of products each day, yet have very little idea of how they got to us. In a very interesting way, this book offers a glimpse into the lives of those who carry the products that keep our economy churning.
I agree with some previous criticism that the chapter about his canoe trip on the Merrimack River, while interesting, is a little out of place. That chapter is more of a book review of Thoreau's work, but it does tie into the theme of "carriers" by discussing how these Eastern rivers were such important trade routes in the 1800s.
June 28, 2008 | |
Uncommon Carriers -- uncommonly good
Uncommon Carriers -- a book by John McPhee. Like all of McPhee's books, this one provides fascinating insights into a world we all take for granted. The author brings the subject to life and puts a human face on processes we tend to think of as mechanical. You will never look at a truck on the highway, a freighter coming into port, a UPS plane, or a freight train in the same way after you've read this book.
May 17, 2008 | |
Transporters
The eclectic and readable McPhee strikes again in this engaging study of people engaged in unconventional forms of transportation. But the coverage of trucks, ships, and trains brings out what is truly great about McPhee - his ability to ruminate on other tangential matters, including little-known facts about the world's transportation systems and the real non-stereotypical people who operate them. This rambling and eclectic style is actually one of McPhee's most underappreciated strengths, as the reader barely notices how one chapter morphs from a down-home look at a Nova Scotia lobster farm to a scientific examination of the enormous UPS complex in Louisville. In one chapter McPhee also replicates a canoe trip once taken by Thoreau, and in the process also replicates Thoreau's penchant for literary flights of fancy while ruminating on transportation systems of long-gone eras. This book isn't quite as substantial or socially observant as some of McPhee's classics, but as usual he has delivered a very readable look at parts of the world that you know are there but haven't much thought about - and all with his dependable humor, literacy, and insight. [~doomsdayer520~]
April 06, 2008 | |
McPhee Delivers
Uncommon Carriers proves again that John McPhee is the modern master of the discursive essay.
Conversations with Don Ainsworth and his chemical tanker truck bookend a series of essays on the transportation trade. "Ainsworth's middle names could be 'Free Association'" writes McPhee of this kindred spirit. In addition to the tanker trade, the book reports McPhee's experiences and meditations on rail, freighter, barge, and air freight.
At the center of the volume is McPhee's affectionate re-creation of Thoreau's "Five Days on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers" - a journey into the headwaters of McPhee's literary style.
December 30, 2007 | |
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